Challenging Canada in Haiti: People to People Solidarity

By Kabir Joshi-Vijayan
Kabir is a 15-year old Toronto high school student who has been a coordinating member of the Toronto Haiti Action Committee and Canada Haiti Action Network for almost five years.  He is also involved with a community organizing project called BASICS Community Newsletter (www.basicsnewsletter. blogspot.com) which produces its own independent community newspaper and radio show.

I recently attended a Caribbean Studies student conference in Toronto where the Consul General of a Caribbean country that I won’t name posed an interesting question to the Caribbean diasporic audience. He first expressed concern about the disproportionate levels of poverty in Toronto’s Caribbean community and the unacceptable school drop-out rates among its youth.  He said that Canada was considering hosting the 2015 Pan American Games and expected the Caribbean countries to loyally support Canada’s bid.  He asked whether Caribbean governments might reasonably request something in return for their bloc support – like some sort of benefit from the games for Canada’s Caribbean communities?  As a Canadian youth who had spent the past five years examining my country’s criminal role in the overthrow of democracy in the Caribbean country of Haiti, I could not help but extract from the question another reference to the neo-colonial character of Canada’s relationships with its Caribbean neighbours. I have been organizing with fellow Canadians from the Canada Haiti Action Network to oppose and expose Canada’s ongoing violation of Haitian sovereignty.  In the process, I have not only acquired a better understanding of the nature of the Canadian state and the responsibility of international solidarity, but in learning about the remarkable struggle for self determination of the Haitian people, I have also developed a more meaningful vision for my own activism in Canada.

In my naivete about Canadian foreign policy, I was surprised at what a central role Canada played in the violent February, 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti and in its bloody aftermath. In fact, it was Canada that a year earlier had consolidated the international coup forces; that had supplied military personnel to first assist in the kidnapping of Haiti’s popular president, and then contain the Haitian resistance to that kidnapping; that helped install and sustain a brutal two year dictatorship; that used development aid dollars to reinstitute a militarized police force which along with the United Nations occupation force, killed and maimed with impunity more poor Haitians than any violence that they were purportedly  there to contain; and to impose neoliberal economic and governance reforms that the Haitian people had unequivocally rejected in every single democratic forum.   The Canadian government acted in close collaboration with Haiti’s tiny economic elite, and even as the country was in the midst of a social, economic and political crisis, Canadian companies operating in the manufacturing, mining, reconstruction and other sectors managed to increase profits and secure lucrative investment opportunities.  Of course, I’ve since learned that Canada’s actions in Haiti were not atypical, and Canadian businesses have come to be a major force in the Caribbean economy precisely because of Canada’s direct support of and participation in colonial, neo-colonial and imperial ventures in the region for more than a century.

Another disturbing revelation, and one that should be of concern to all immigrant people in Canada, was the way in which the Canadian government has attempted to suppress resistance to its foreign policy goals in Haiti by targeting its Haitian diaspora. On the one hand the Canadian government actively recruited among Haitian Canadians to be stakeholders in the post coup “reconstruction” of Haiti (thereby attempting to contain criticism from that political force in Canada), and on the other hand punished any association with the popular movement in Haiti.  Haitians with political affiliations at odds with Canada’s objectives have been threatened, imprisoned or barred entry into Canada.  For example, a Haitian Canadian named to Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board had his nomination suspended due to his previous membership in the Lavalas Party of demonized and deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Canadian civil society and media contribution to the discourse of Canada in Haiti have mostly reiterated the racist government narrative about a violent and backward people unable to govern themselves and in desperate need of Canada’s guidance. It’s not unusual that condemnation of the coup and demand for a public enquiry into the kidnapping of President Aristide by CARICOM, the African Union and the Black Caucus of the United States Congress went unheard in our Canadian parliament and international fora like the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

One main objective of the Haiti solidarity movement has been to inform the Canadian public about the devastating consequences of their government’s interventionist actions in Haiti.  We have attempted to do so by linking our solidarity with the popular movements in Haiti, and by being conscientious about having our work informed by those popular movements.  Our analyses of Canada’s role in Haiti come from independent investigators, and directly from Haitian journalists, activists and leaders representing the slum dwellers and the peasants who have been impacted most tragically by the coup.  The challenge we face has been to avoid interfering in the internal politics of the popular movements so we focus our demands on removing the constraints, pressure and occupation our own country imposes.  This comes with the understanding that real development and progress in the Global South will come from independent people’s movements, such as the democratic process (that Canada helped to quash) that was trying to dismantle the apartheid social structures that two centuries of foreign domination constructed and continues to maintain in that country.

It has been this popular movement of the poor majority of Haiti that has influenced my own activism most profoundly.  It was this pro-democracy force that first mobilized in the Haitian streets (and churches, schools, fields and slums) to identify the basis of their social and political exclusion and to challenge state repression.   The same force that, even after succeeding in putting in power a populist president, continues to mobilize to bring down that western supported system of inequality and social apartheid. The process and its outcome is the truest form of civic and political engagement.

In the same way I believe that we need confidence in our activism to create collective spaces for similar social engagement where we can strategize and develop our own collective social vision.  When we look at poor racialized communities in Canada (particularly those made of diasporas from the same regions in which Canadian imperialism is well-established) we see similar conditions of poverty, marginalization, police violence and racism (alluded to by the Consul General). The residents of these communities, and particularly the youth are eager to address the challenges. However, they are generally encouraged to direct their energies towards a kind of institutionalized activism that tends to be state sanctioned and where political responses are restrained.  It is disempowering and falls short of both channelling youth’s passion and addressing the real needs of their communities.  The reality is that activism in the West has much to learn from the rich histories and cultures of radical resistance in the Global South.  It’s another reason why the Haitian popular movement behind the leadership of Aristide has been so demonized by the Canadian state.  It is the threat of a good example for our bourgeois democracy in Canada.  Meaningful change for oppressed populations in Canada and the Caribbean will only come when progressive democratic movements of the people take hold in both regions.